Early Modern Notes

Even quieter about these parts than usual as I went to visit friends who have just moved into a new place in Glasgow. No internet connection yet. A good area for wifi, but it’s still strange not to have the Joy of Google at hand to answer all those trivial (yet vital of course) ‘Do you remember when… What was that place called… but isn’t X dead… what else was he in then… etc’ questions that come up in conversation. We were all so ignorant before teh Internets, eh?

Anyway, it was a good weekend. The weather was glorious, there was dancing, plenty of good food and we rounded it off with an Ani Difranco gig. Fantastic.

Recycling old posts! Why didn’t I think of it before?!

This blog passed its 3rd birthday early in the summer and I didn’t really notice. Tsk. Anyway, I’ve written about 1400 posts in that time, and some of them were quite good. So I’ll re-post a few over the next week or so [requests taken] while I get on with my holiday and important stuff like:

* Reading crime novels.

* Watching Twenty20 cricket (for free on the internet, thanks to P2P). Just don’t mention England.

* Oh, and the Rugby World Cup (christ, ITV’s coverage is crap). Good to see the northern hemisphere doing so well, right? Har har bloody har.

* Watching DVDS: Angel (yay)! Farscape (extra yay, cos’ I didn’t pay anything for it!).

* Heroes on BBC2. Awesome.

* Oh yeah, dealing with the final stages of editing the book manuscript. There is an ominous email in my inbox right now whose title mentions the word ‘index’. I haven’t had the courage to open it yet.

Sorry for lack of posting lately - I’ve been enjoying some much needed holiday. Here are some photos from my trip to Aberystwyth last week, anyway. (They’d have been up earlier, but I’m damned if I can find the password for my original Flickr account, so I’ve had to set up a new one, for now. I hate it when that happens…)

(This year is the 100th anniversary of the National Library of Wales.)

This week I’ll hopefully be going down to London to see some terracotta soldiers. There may be blogging, there may not.

(Cultural literacy prerequisites: Irn-Bru, The Snowman)

This is a horribly self-indulgent post about self-indulgence, so I’ll put it below the fold. But (slightly more) seriously, there was a lot of good and not too expensive food to be had in Philadelphia, so why not plug the places I liked?

Photos tomorrow!

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Let there be much quaffing and stuffing of the face and loosening of the waistbands.

Have a good Christmas or [your preferred festivities] and New Year. See you in 2006.

I started to write a comment in response to Rebecca’s post about the pleasures of the beach, but as is the way with these things sometimes, it turned into something I wanted to post here.

In a way, the downside of living by the sea is that you start to take it for granted, not least the fresh air; it’s always moving, never gets that stagnant, smoggy feel of inland places - especially cities.

When my friends who are living inland come to visit, the first thing they always have to do is rush down to the seafront and take plenty of deep breaths, with me following behind going, huh? what’s the big deal? And then I start to see it through their eyes and remember why I love it here so much.

It’s not the world’s greatest beach - no golden sands here, I’m afraid. (And there are spots round by the pier where the delicious aroma of rotting seaweed can become just a little overpowering.) But the views are sublime at any time of year.

OK, this time of year I need my fan turned on in the afternoons when I’m working in my living room. But that’s the downside of having a very large west-facing window (aka ’sun-trap’), isn’t it?

(Really must get a better picture of this view from my window when the sun is out…)

Back on the beach this afternoon. It was colder than at midnight on New Year’s Eve. And it has been a little windy…

It’s only 2 January and I’ve remembered to put up my Fabulous 1950s Advertising calendar already. This may be a record.

Back home after a great week’s holiday…

Immediate tasks (not New Year resolutions because I don’t do that kind of shite): Must clean out flat before the end of 2004. And get on with work. (Too many January deadlines…) Then some blogging, but not properly till next week.

Christmas tallies

Hangovers: 2. Different kinds of alcohol consumed: 7, I think, including the sip of aniseed-flavoured stuff that I didn’t like (and counting fizzy wine separately from the other kinds). Too much gin. Gin is bad, bad, bad. And this tastes like alcoholic Mini Milk lollipops. Wowee.

Calories: Who knows? Who cares?

Movies: 5 (very light - and rather random - viewing this year): The Wicked Lady (DVD); Victor/Victoria; What’s Up Doc?; Mouse Hunt; at the cinema: The Incredibles ( fantastic! go see!)

Shopping: shamefully self indulgent, and mostly very pink (wanna see my pink boots?).

I’m taking several days off blogging now. I’ll be spending a good part of Christmas with friends eating too much and drinking even more (and although they have internet access, I have come to the conclusion that alcohol + blogging = unwise in the extreme). But in any case I think I should take a blog holiday, after six months near-continuous posting. So I probably won’t be back much before the New Year (maybe the occasional brief silliness or photos if I get severe withdrawal symptoms).

There are certain things that I planned to blog by now that haven’t happened: the second part of the ‘how to get funding’ post, and roundups of links for South America and the Middle East. They’ll just have to wait till January. I may have a go at those Lollards when I get back too. And high time there were more DNB posts! (I’m up for New Year biography requests…)

But, anyway, let me leave you with a few links for the holiday season, and wish you all the best whatever your faith and preferred festivities.

Nadolig Llawen!

Winter festivals and traditions
Winter festivals
Origins of mid-winter festivals
Winter festivals/festivals of light

Names of the Christmas festivals
Eleven Christmas customs (sepoy, this has a section on Christmas trees!… But no, I don’t know why you dragged a 7 foot tree into your living room. Where I celebrate Christmas this would be regarded as an absurd distraction from eating and drinking)
Wikipedia Christmas
Winter solstice and Christmas
History of Hogmanay
A Scottish Hogmanay
A Victorian Christmas

Early Modern Christmases and Controversies
Cotton Mather’s dilemma: Christmas in Puritan New England
Feast, fairs and festivals: mirrors of Renaissance society
Christmas unwrapped
Christmas witchcraft in 17th-century Finnmark
Notes on seventeenth-century English Christmases
Christmas in and out (by John Taylor, the ‘water poet’)
The ascetic and the skeptical

Chanukah Wikipedia
Chanukah
History of Chanukah
History of Hanukkah

The official Kwanzaa website
Everything about Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa Information Centre

Saturnalia
Saturnalia Special
Saturnalia Convivia
Celebrating Solstice
Ancient origins: Yule
History of the yule log
Midvinterblot
Wassailing
Iroquois Midwinter Dream Festival

And… Let the Christmas/holiday blogging commence (maybe I will come back and add to this section!)

Hark the Herald Tribune Sings
Seize to exist, or a short hiatus

(Of course, the Chanukah/Hanukkah already started earlier in the month…)
And for the Victories
Eighth Candle (follow links in sidebar to the rest of the Candles)

Of course, what I’m really waiting for is Belle’s Christmas feasting post(s).

Well, I’m back in London after an, er, eventful journey (train broke down on the line in front of us; good job I had plenty of reading material). I can feel the pollution-induced sneezing coming on already, and it’s so damned stuffy here. My holiday is well and truly over. (I can’t wait until November when this research trip will be finally done… just in time for winter in west Wales.)

Mind you, I shall feel a lot less grumpy about being in London next week when I’m in the NFT soaking up the genius of Kevin Brownlow…

The Old College was the original home of the university in Aberystwyth, opened in 1872 and the first university in Wales (grand total: 26 students; the first female students arrived in 1883). The Penglais campus on the hill (with important outliers at Llanbadarn) is now, with the expansion of the university in the second half of the twentieth century, the main site for teaching. Old College is now largely used for administration, although two major departments, Welsh and Education, still reside there.

In a period of building expansion with the coming of the railway line during the 1860s, it had originally been built as a hotel, but the company went bust before completion and offered it to the recently established university committee. It was a bargain; about £80,000 had already been spent on the building works, and the university got it (though incomplete) for £10,000. But it was still a struggle to get the university up and running. Much of the early funding came from public subscriptions within Wales (it’s clear that getting any aid at all from governments was an extremely difficult task until the mid-1880s), and many of those were very small sums, the “pennies from the people of Wales” as authors (rather sentimentally) put it. But perhaps that had advantages; as a result, they regarded it as their college and were prepared to fight for its survival at the most desperate time after the fire of 1885, and when official policy (and money) would have ignored Aberystwyth in favour of colleges at Cardiff and Bangor.

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Well, holiday is almost over. I didn’t get to the library last week, so I have to go in tomorrow. (But at least I don’t have to go back to smelly old London for a few more days.)

I’ve read plenty of fun stuff (especially Christopher Brookmyre); watched videos (last couple of days have been catching up on missed early episodes of Queer as Folk - the British original, not that rubbish American version); eating far too much (I made coq au vin the other night, for the first time; tonight however was time for an old favourite, tortilla. And let’s not talk about how much cheese I got from the deli… although it was exceedingly good cheese). I’ll have a few more photos for you over the next few days. For now, just one. I showed you my local pub the other day. There are a lot of ‘em in Aber, from trendy student bars to cosy old-fashioned hostelries.

But there are also many chapels, although it’s probably fair to say that the town’s nonconformist heyday is long past. (But I think it’s true that chapel and church here still play a far more significant role than they do in most English towns…) There’s still a dizzying array of denominations, often in both ‘English’ and ‘Welsh’ versions. Some are modest, but there are some very grand nineteenth-century buildings too. This is Seion Welsh Congregationalist chapel, built in the 1870s.

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make it Donna Moore’s tale of the number 62 bus. (Donna is guesting at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. This is gonna be fun.)

After reminding myself of it the other day, I quite fancied watching Holiday again. I don’t have a copy of my own - I have a tiny video collection, due to having spent most of the last 10 years watching other peoples’ (until 6 months ago I hadn’t even owned a VCR for over a decade). So, I trotted off to the local video shops.

And this is when you’re reminded of the disadvantages of living in a small town miles from anywhere. In fact, because we have a film studies department at the university, we probably do better than many places of this size (something that is often the case). We have a local video rental store that has a pretty impressive selection of non-Hollywood and b/w films, and the town library has a surprisingly eclectic range too (mmm, might have to watch Edge of Darkness again. And how long since I watched I, Claudius?).

Nonetheless, no Holiday. So instead, I’ve just watched His Girl Friday instead. What a script. Too many fantastic gags to quote. And Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are just amazing. (As are Russell’s outfits.)

Tomorrow night I have Croupier to watch. Would you believe I’ve never seen it?

Yesterday was a truly glorious day. (Today not so brilliant; the weather forecast is not great at all. Well, it’s August Bank Holiday weekend. Of course it will rain…)

Wander down to the seafront and turn right (realising that it might have been good to remember my sunglasses).

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There are views that you simply have to visit the place to see properly. My camera certainly can’t capture them for you. Still, here’s a sort of tour of what happens if you leave my flat and head up the hill towards the university.

First, you have to get past my local (in need of a new paintjob perhaps; they did some work and haven’t got round to repainting). Good company in both Welsh and English, good beer, no jukebox.

Then, upwards. There is a particularly steep, though mercifully short, stretch if you take the back way to Y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, the National Library of Wales.

Ok, that’s a pretty impressive building; but much better is what you can see if you go up to the main entrance and face out. This may be the place for the best views of Aber, a panoramic sweep of the twon and Cardigan Bay. Um, use your imagination.

After the deliriously loopy Old College in town, there isn’t much on the main Penglais campus that’s worth getting excited about. It’s just another concrete campus, albeit one dramatically perched on the side of hill and with plenty of greenery and sea views. But perhaps the Physical Sciences block deserves an honourable mention. I like curvy buildings. And red and mauve…

A few pictures before I go out for the day.

There is a great tradition around these parts of painting shops and houses (which are mostly stone built) bright colours. It has a practical purpose; it’s surprising how much damp (big issue by the seaside) a couple of coats of heavy-duty waterproof paint will keep out. But it looks darned pretty too. Imagine whole rows of houses all in different colours.

And here are two of my favourite shops; food for the body and the soul…

(this is the best photo I could get, since the traffic was getting busy. Well, I did at one point have a perfect clear shot… except that a bloody cyclist came whizzing straight in front of me on the pavement just as I pressed the button. Grr)

Those who have been reading this blog for a while will have gathered that I’m rather fond of this small seaside university town. Now I’m here with my camera, and avoiding any ’serious’ blogging for a few days, I’m going to take the opportunity to show it to you.

This is the view from my bedroom window, facing south-west

And here is the Old College in all its Victorian Gothic barminess (sorry about that road sign. And it isn’t really that crooked; that’s the camera…)

A close-up. What drugs were they on when they designed this door?

And last but not least for today, the promenade in the early evening with a mild breeze catching the sea. That’s Constitution Hill sticking up at the back

After being away for three weeks, I’m unusually sensitive to things I don’t usually take much notice of: the sound of the waves (I can hear them as I type), the salty-seaweedy smell. And I can take a deep breath here without immediately having a hay-fever/pollution induced sneezing fit.

Tomorrow I should be going up the hill, so fingers crossed for some good views.